


Watch Your Steps

by potionpen



Series: Blind Glory [1]
Category: Slayers (anime)
Genre: 30 Kisses prompts, F/M, Gen, Illustrated, Interfaith, Knights - Freeform, M/M, Xeru wa fushigii desu (and Rezo is a manwhore), be my eyes, bulldozers and shadowdancers, fond exasperation, human Xel, pre-Kouma Sensou, pre-geezers being young, premazoku Xel, slices of life, we're gonna win the universe!, who wants to live forever?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-16
Updated: 2011-12-16
Packaged: 2017-10-27 10:36:17
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,270
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/294869
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/potionpen/pseuds/potionpen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The world in motley<br/>A cliff's-edge veiled in promise<br/>Priests in love with life.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Watch Your Steps

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: Profitless fanwork.
> 
> Nature: A preface, or condensation, to the tune of the 30 Kiss prompts.
> 
> Note: The pictures are actually in reverse chronological order, while the drabbles are the opposite. In this universe, people in this culture didn't cut their hair until they came of age. This probably does not matter to you, but there it is.
> 
> Shameless begging: I need help with the story this is attached to. More on that below. If you like this story, please, don't be shy.

**  
_"anou sa"_   
**

The sky is white and soft as goose-down, and that means the winds will stay dry. The sun strokes pale buildings pink, illuminates the creamy mortar between dark bricks, marries with everyone's picture windows to illustrate the welcoming pavement. Light on ocean waves turns them to churned bottle-green glass, makes sails into sunbursts. Your shadow unfurls before you, an emperor's red carpet, and you know all this because he tells you so.

 **  
_jolt!_   
**

Someone needs to tell that idiot he isn't actually a real monkey. Swish! He's warm against you in Levitation's bracing wind. Pow! That bastard knocked him flat and whoops! He's tripped you on your way to crush the creep. Boing! There's laughter from the weight on your shoulders. ARGH! Being unanswerable doesn't make him right. Lord! No wonder he sleeps so hard. Click! You come together perfectly.

 **  
_gardenia_   
**

Cripples limp along slowly. The strong aren't fragile, the sensitive aren't strong, the humble are fearful, the brave speak straight and stand up for themselves. The wicked aren't kind, the good can be tolerated for more than five minutes put together before they need a good thumping. A brat who sings filthy ballads at the top of his lungs in a public park in daylight isn't the kind of boy to make flower crowns. Lemon and cocoa don't mix.

Oddly beautiful, this business of being wrong.

 **  
_#10_   
**

You wonder how often you've done this together, the two of you, because you don't remember. When you bed someone, every time is a first until it gets old fast. Somehow, though, he mixes it all up into interchangeable, timeless moments in a fresh eternity, and it's all very strange, except that it isn't at all.

Nine, he tells you, and you laugh, "You keep track?"

"Tame that ego," he sniffs. "I just count the memories."

 **  
_in a good mood_   
**

"Life is beautiful!" he trills, and "I know;" you grumble, "you're giving me a headache."

"It's all somatic, really," he says carelessly. "I mean, you know you don't actually have an empathophagic demon in your head, right?"

"Dolorophagic, and some of us believe in mazoku," you sigh, because one of them is sending spikes through your eyelids in self-defense against his cheer, and a Recovery would just make it worse.

"Some of us are superstitious and brainwashed," he agrees sadly, and you smile because you wish he could convince you.

 **  
_superstar_   
**

Your first Ra Tilt is lightning, is divinity, is orgasm without the sweat and grunting. It flows as sweet, charged water through your fingers, and the sullen, pulsing ache behind your eyes is nothing but victory. You're joy on the wind, and you have to share. A torch of enthusiasm, he cries, "Yeah! And, ooh, did you try triangulating with both hands? 'Cause **_BOOM!"_**

 **  
_the space between dream and reality_   
**

He stumbles when he wakes in the morning, and his face when you touch it is soft and bewildered. "I always forget," he laughs ruefully, "about this matter-and-gravity world."

 **  
_perfect blue_   
**

He drags you ice skating and sledding and into the forest to knock icicles down and make them chime, and tricks you into making the _worst_ shapes instead of snowmen. You have fires and roast things on sticks in them and sleep in front of them on the sofa with a living blanket, and have to put on so many layers that getting undressed becomes a choice of tearing whirlwind or activity for the evening.

Still, in the quiet moments between explosions, he fades every day until spring, until you think the sighted must see him a clouded window, dull and shadowed as he claims his hair is (you don't believe him). He says it's seasonal-affective and sunlight will make it better, but long stretches of wet, windy, dismal days only make him radiant and wild.

 **  
_news_   
**

Winter in Testabourne is sultry and close, and sometimes it rains. The chills down your bones could be heatstroke, could be malaria. They aren't. Winter in Lyzeille is bitter and bleak and its days are dark, and the ship came without his letter.

 **  
_over here_   
**

"Listen," he says, "it's not velvet, not stiff enough, it doesn't rasp right," and, "Ooh, _gorgeous_ color, it looks like hot butter smells," and "Oh, feel that, isn't it soft? Try it on, they'll stare at you." On the sidewalk, in the face of skeptical drills between your shoulders, he noses possessively at your elbow and says peacefully, "If they do more than stare I'll turn 'em into newts."

High-heeled bootsteps that were sidling towards you sidle away again, considerably faster. Wise girl; he wouldn't hesitate a second.

 **  
_kilohertz_   
**

Even though you were templemates, you aren't intimate enough with Cama Varus (you hear they're calling her the Silver Maiden now, and it makes you wonder what they'd call her if they knew it was only men she'd sworn off) to ask her what the Dragon's benediction feels like to her. You've never even met that guy in SaoLon they call the Green Sage. To you He's a cool breeze, joyfully invigorating and calmly uplifting even in the dead of winter.

You don't have to ask what the Mother's grace is to your golden mage. Not when you find yourself, at the most random moments, leaning into the ecstatic thrill of a warmth that isn't there.

 **  
_our own world_   
**

He's very proud of his house, and he tells you about the clean lines and the engravings on the doors so you can find your way around and how he saved up enough from his job at the restaurant (religion may warm your soul, but the body needs cash to live) to buy it outright, and then he falters, and asks why you're frowning. "What you need," you say severely, "is two cats and a garden." He calls you all kinds of crazy, but you start planning seed beds.

(and, later, sub-basements)

 **  
_distance_   
**

"I didn't say he wasn't attractive," he scowls, "I said I don't want to sleep with him."  
"Can't I love a person," he begs, "without being in love with them?"  
"I don't care if he's crushing on me," he sulks, "it isn't mutual."  
"We're too much alike!" he shouts. "And he likes him _way_ better than I like me."  
"I wish," he snarls, "that you weren't such a sucker for pheromones and shiny scales."  
"If we do this," he warns, "it'll hurt him."

But you can't stop wondering if a golden angel will help you to god. The grace with which he gives in is only middling dismal, and only in private, and surely he's said no to you before.

 **  
_home_   
**

It's six hundred and twenty-four paces from your office to the palace gates if you take the direct route. Sometimes you don't. It's good to pass the buttery and the smithy and all the nooks that keep the place running and give the staff the opportunity to remember that you're there and approachable in case they lose a hand or something sometimes. And then there's the city to walk though.

It was only four hundred and sixty eight paces to your chamber before you moved off-grounds, but your work invariably followed you upstairs. The hem of your robes bring you to the cleaners more often, now, but he's been so busy lately that if anyone stays the night it's going to have to be you.

 **  
_chain_   
**

Your secretary had been resorting to more and more exotic perfumes before she turned to incense, and you don't mention it only because you rather like the sandalwood, and the way the flagonwood and rose mix. The jasmine gets to you just like it's meant to, but what it makes your palms ache for lately isn't a soft or lush heft or an hourglass curve, and all you want to do is go home. You never trust any new urges, but this one fits snugly into the nice, safe belt-to-neck zone and feels, somehow, oddly, established. Maybe it's your own after all?

 **  
_cassette_   
**

All right, recording your snoring to convince you that you do it was fair. The commentary about how tilting your head to this angle and that affected the sound was actually pretty funny. You had, in fact, been just about ready to get the damn procedure done, in return for homemade ice cream for a month. Since it meant that much to him and all. After all, a good night's sleep is terribly important--and you were going to get to pick the flavors for once.

But droll or not, setting it up to play in your office when he very well knew you had a meeting scheduled with your most sanctimonious associate--that was just _wrong_.

Suffer, bitch!

 **  
_dash_   
**

He won't let you in the kitchen any more, but what does he expect if he won't label his containers? It said a pinch of salt and a cup of sugar, but they both feel the same. How are you supposed to hygienically tell two identically-shaped bins of finely granulated silical powders apart? And that, er, incident with the baking soda you thought was flour? So not your fault.

 **  
_"say ahh...."_   
**

The clinks and thunks from the kitchen have been driving you insane all morning, so you're very pleased when the Construction Guild people come in the afternoon to start working on the space you cleared out for the new basement level (he assures you that the looks they always give you for making cavernous holes under an existing house are spectacular, but every so often a guy just needs a new lab). Their voices and machinery drown out the deceptively domestic noises, and you manage to forget for hours on end that he's doing dangerously experimental things that don't raise the temperature at all.

He comes down at three with iced coffee for the workers and taps you on the nose with a cold metal spoon, demanding, "Open up, guinea pig."

Frozen heaven is a melting explosion of spices in your mouth. "Open up yourself," you say, and bring it to his. The catcalls from the workers make you smirk into each other.

 **  
_invincible_   
**

He loves it when you fuss, and this is somehow why he gets all petulant and whiny about it and insists he can take care of himself and danger's what he was trained for, Bright Lady's sake.

You love it when he whines on the stairs, because he's too busy yawping about how cracking competent he is to look where he's going, and ends up sprawled at the bottom, and announces, meditatively, "Ow."

And then, after you've finished lording it over him, you get to fuss some more.

 **  
_red_   
**

Grey is shadow, he tells you, and grey is smoke. Grey is the sky before rain, and grey is mist, and grey is steel. Grey is fog and grey is silver and the underside of young willow leaves in the sun, and grey is the bright edge of a stormcloud and the fluffy ash on a dying ember. The coal's heart, he tells you, is crimson.

 **  
_plunder_   
**

The air is choked with bitter soot and the screaming of the silenced, and the bright autumn sun streaks fire in your closed eyes. The thousand sounds of a city, its thousand joys that triggered your headache an hour ago and sent you to the cool stone of the temple to sleep are nothing now but empty breeze, its thousand smells charred charnel and settling dust. The library crumbled at your touch, an avalanche of ash and cinders, and the only light you've ever grasped is cold in your arms, cold to your hands, still to your kiss, so parched the emptied veins droop beneath your feather fingers.

Icy lips arch a slow, sweet smile beneath yours, and for half a fairy-tale moment you can dream of miracle.

 **  
_candy_   
**

The children you hold to yourself in your pale wanderings come and go, taken and left. They are simple, elegant, noble, worshipful, solid, shy, honest, redeemable, tender, faithful, enthralled, adventurous, fervent, stubborn, wonderful people, and every one of them born tougher then you ever dreamed of needing to be.

The foul spectre of living glory laughs at each one, dissects them with bored, ruthless amusement, and demands to know what you're wasting your time for. You drive him away day after decade, insist to yourself that someday you'll find another match, ignore the slow strangulation of your faith, and dream the hundreds of new lives he could have been born into by now if he'd only had the common decency to (simply) die.

 **  
_cradle_   
**

Her efficiency behind the counter secured your custom. Her competence with a pestle drew your approval. Her fresh scent caught your attention, her kindness your patronage, her wit your friendship. Her heat won your bed, and her warmth your heart.

It wasn't until he tried to destroy her that you knew she was for good.

 **  
_good night_   
**

You've gotten to be a good enough optothaumatologist that lately the only person you pass who'll never see a sunrise lives in your unknown reflection, and your wife makes enough at her pharmacy that you don't need to take payment from anyone who can't afford it. If her turn of phrase doesn't quite bring the world to light, she knows how much it means to you that she wants to try.

His attacks on her have been getting less vicious and more imaginative as she's started to be able to laugh them off, and once she threw an old shoe at him and when you came home half an hour later they were still playing wood racquets with it, shouting and giggling and both younger than you were born. Early evenings at home and walking to work in the sunrise are a quiet joy, and your life would be just about perfect if you could just forget the taste of twilight.

 **  
_fence_   
**

Your heart lurches out of your throat when you come in to sense that astral black hole leaning over your exhausted wife, poison-sweet dark wind held thumb-shaped in soft gloves tracing a pensive arc across the tiny plush cheek of the new miracle in her arms. You're half an breath away from the Ra Tilt to end all Ra Tilts when he turns to you and lightly remarks, "Only a demon godfather will make the Shard's child safe."

All the magic flows out of you in a great gush of relief, and, dizzy with it, you ask, "And the Shard's wife?"

"Can have her measly fifty-odd years," he yawns, all charitable distaste. "If she's too selfish to realize what it's going to do to you when she snuffs it, at least there'll be someone around to pick up the pieces."

 **  
_if only I could make you mine_   
**

It must be difficult to lose your parents so young, and that probably explains why your granddaughter is the way she is. Still, your son lost his birth-parents almost as young, and he's strong and steady anyway. And _his_ birth-father was scum, his birth-mother a nervous wreck to the end, while your son and his wife were the sweetest, most harmless people under the sun until the accident (and you're sure it was an accident because, two days later, the man who made the defective stove was eaten by wolves who left no fur but left his head and torso completely intact).

You're not at all sure your baby girl is going to make a good wife or mother, and sometimes you wonder, in your more guiltily honest moments--well--the point of being adopted is that you don't _have_ to marry into the family; doesn't your boy have any taste?

That's probably why, when the up-until-then-invisible imp on the ceiling dumps a bucket of glue all over the happy couple during the kiss ("To preserve the moment!") you have to let your papery-skinned wife sort out the carnage while you flee into the other room and laugh yourself sick.

 ** _overflow_**  
The future is an eternity of blindness with no one to light it and she's cold in the ground. Your sons by blood and by choice are both gone, and your grand-daughter, your last child, spent the funeral of the only mother she ever knew hinting over her attentive baby's head that now you're unencumbered you should be Taking Care of the Family Problem.

But it's the 'family problem' who's taking care of you. Hands cold as death and as tender washing over your face, cold, supple lips on your closed eyelids, and loveyouloveyouloveyou each breath. You're a typhoon with loss and he offers his mouth to secrete your screams in, you need to claw through the face of death and he heals behind your fingers and holds you, kisses your temple, laps at your pain and sucks it away like snakebite until you're empty.

And she's gone, _she's gone_ , but you know him mortal and demon and if love is the only lie he's ever told you, maybe it isn't a lie after all. And if he can, and if he does-- maybe, if eating pain diminishes it, maybe the mazoku aren't so bad...

Thickly malevolent, alien triumph sears agony through your mind, and the last thing you'll ever know is the gasp of his astonishment. The last secret you'll never learn is: horror or success?

 **  
_calcium_   
**

Hell is vision without eyes. Hell is seeing the monstrosities done with your bloody hands in your absence, seeing those they twist love who they think is you more and more and with sicker devotion each day. Hell is bone-cold suspension next to your wife with a solid foot of dark crystal between you. Hell is not being able to help the people who want to kill you. Hell is the gossip of its passing minions as they wonder what that shady pest is up to, that no one's heard a word from him all month, year, decade.

Hell's torments are just a pain in the insubstantial glutes. Hell is _where the hell is he?_

 ** _waves_**  
Things might be less confusing if she were less sure of yourself, but there's one thing you haven't lost sight of, even with your horrible new eye and this stone in your head feeding you her poison: it was that _thing_ that bore the name of Rezo who stole your life away, and destroyed everyone left of your family, and hurt an unfeeling monster so badly with stolen hands that he hasn't come to annoy you in this new life. It was that Rezo person who was weak enough to let that abomination through a crack in his mind. You're going to be stronger than him.

She, that girl who once, you think, wore sweet lace instead of spikes, touched your arm with hesitant reverence, she wants you to be strong, too. What she means isn't what you mean, but the difference gets harder to remember by the day.

 **  
_kiss_   
**

_The grass is soft against his cheeks, and the scarred and sacred tree is forest and forever, and the stone is cool in its shade. Piteous and barren, this flat half a grey oval, too simple to mark a man, though there are statues here and there. No rock here to build a world on, but he's been moorless long enough to almost forget what it was like to have a home. There are worse places to rest, and morbidness hasn't bothered him for a long, long time. Some might (meaning, most would) call it sick to find haven here, but, maa, ne, that's practically a compliment, now, isn't it?_

**Author's Note:**

> This is _indeed_ a preface to or condensation of a major WIP (currently at around p 260, I think), and I could really truly honestly seriously use someone to talk to about it, as I have been stuck between points M and N for some time but feel this piece deserves completion. I don't beg for reviews in this forum, but I will and do beg anyone who's interested in being involved in betaing, sounding-boarding, or goading to contact me. Seriously: **please**.


End file.
